Friday, December 16, 2005

Holidays

I'm off for some badly needed R&R (though I will have work to do on the trip). Here's wishing Happy Holidays (Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Festivus, or if you celebrate none of these, just the holiness or wholeness of every day) to all!

1 comment:

Hello, everyone, it's Francisco Mejia. Look, here's a topic that I think you should discuss on your blog: the lack of respect the literati have for fantasy and science fiction! I'm getting so tired of this, I'm about to start kicking heads off of shoulders soon!

I think it's your RESPONSIBILITY, John, as an university professor, to face this topic, confront it, wrestle it into the ground and pound its head against concrete till its brains rocket from the ears. How come the literati place REALISM in such an exclusive pantheon??? Why is it always Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, Faulkner whom have virgins sacrificed at their gold-plated altars, and yet we're not in our Humanities classes digesting the brilliant works of Clark Ashton Smith or H.P. Lovecraft??? What's up with this IGNORANT and ARROGANT disrespect of writers who don't have to rely on reality to tell a story??? We're in damn good company: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. All these supergeniuses wrote fantasy!

And the prose of someone like Clark Ashton Smith is just as great, if not superior to, John Updike or Michael Chabon, whom have both won the Pulitzer Prize! What's up with this unaccounted snobbery, and this slavish, almost ritualistic devotion, to reality??? More props to the writer who doesn't have to look out the window or read the newspaper, to cull tales; more props to the weird wordsmith who gathers his story in the subterranean hallways of Venus, than someone who looks no further than a foot in front of himself. It's time to fight back!

And think of this absurd catergory, MAGICAL REALISM? What the FUCK is that? I'll tell you what it is: it was a category created so that the stuck-up, potato-chip-in-their-ass snobs won't lose sleep at night for lauding a fantasist! Man, FUCK those small-minded peanut-heads; I see more infinity in one of God's toenail clippings!!!!!!!!!!

The above was a bomb that's going to set off in your unconscious tonight when you're sleeping!!!!!